Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2009 (21. évfolyam, 1-50. szám)

2009-05-01 / 17. szám

Hungarian Journal

Born a Hundred Years Ago: Poet, Translator, Victim of the Holocaust

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944)

Poet, translator and essayist Miklós Radnóti was born on May 5th, 1909. He attended elementary schools in Budapest, studied textile-technology in Liberec in the Czech Republic, and then returned to Hungary to study French language and literature at the University of Szeged, where he obtained his doctorate in 1934. Two years later he married the love of his youth, Fanny Gyarmati, and in the same year he received his teacher’s diploma. He made his living by writing and journalism, contributing mainly to liberal or left-leaning newspapers and periodicals. In 1937 he received the Baumgarten Prize from the hands of Mihály Babits, a prize awarded to the ‘most promising writer of the given year’.

That same summer, accompanied by his wife, he went to Paris and participated in demonstrations in support of Republican Spain. Being a man of Jewish origin, after J the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, he was taken to a forced labour camp in Serbia, near Bor. j There he had to work in copper mines and build roads. In October 1944 the Germans evacuated Serbia, and j Radnóti’s labour unit was driven in a forced march towards Austria. En route, in north-west Hungary, with j twenty-two others, he was shot dead by his guards and buried in a mass grave.

Several volumes of his poetry appeared during his life, but Radnóti’s popularity, indeed his world fame, j is due to the posthumous volume Foamy Sky [Tajtékos ég], published in 1946. When his body was later j exhumed, a notebook of poems was found sewn into his clothing.

Radnóti’s greatness as a poet is often attributed to his profound morality and keenness of vision, the i sincerity of his love, and his lack of self-pity. His works have been widely read, making him both one of j Eastern Europe’s best-known Holocaust victims and the most translated Hungarian poet. His Postcard j [Razglednica] is one of the most incredible seven-liners in world literature: in a way both ironic and clair- j

voyant, the words seem to predict the poet’s own execution, which was to take place only seven days later, j __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1

The man whose name the city of Burbank bears: Luther Burbank

Luther Burbank (March 7, 1849 - April 11, 1926) was an American botanist, j horticulturist and a pioneer in agricultural science. He developed more than 800 strains j and varieties of plants over his 55-year career. Burbank’s varied creations included fruits, ! flowers, grains, grasses, and vegetables. He was bom 160 years ago,

Burbank’s most successful strains and varieties include the Shasta daisy, the Fire I poppy, the July Elberta peach, the Santa Rosa plum, the Flaming Gold nectarine, j the Wickson plum, the Freestone peach, and the white blackberry. A natural genetic | variant of the Burbank potato with russet-colored skin later became known as the i Russet Burbank potato. This large, brown-skinned, white-fleshed potato has become Í the world’s predominant potato in food processing.

Bom in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Burbank grew up on a farm and received only an elementary educa- j tion. The thirteenth of 15 children, he enjoyed the plants in his mother’s large garden. His father died when j he was 21 years old, and Burbank used his small inheritance to buy a 17 acre (69,000 mt) plot of land near j Lunenburg. Burbank developed the Burbank potato, 1872 to 1874. Burbank sold the rights to the Burbank j potato for $150 and used the money to travel to Santa Rosa, where he purchased a 4-acre (16,000 m2) plot of j land, and established a greenhouse, nursery, and experimental fields that he used to conduct crossbreeding j experiments on plants, inspired by Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestica- j tion. (This site is now open to the public as a city park, Luther Burbank Home and Gardens.)

Burbank became known through his plant catalogues (the most famous was the 1893 catalogue titled j New Creations in Fruits and Flowers), through the word of mouth of satisfied customers, and through flamboyant press reports that kept him in the news throughout the first decade of the century.

Burbank was criticized by scientists of his day because he did not keep the kind of careful records that are the norm in scientific research and because he was mainly interested in getting results rather than in basic research. In 1893, he published a descriptive catalog of some of his best varieties, entitled New Creations in Fruits and Flowers. In 1907, Burbank published an “essay on childrearing,” called The Training of the Human Plant. In it, he advocated improved treatment of children and eugenic practices such as keeping the unfit and first cousins from marrying. During his career, Burbank wrote, or co-wrote, several books on his methods and results, including his eight-volume How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man (1921), Harvest of the Years (with Wilbur Hall, 1927), Partner of Nature (1939), and the 12-volume Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application.

In a speech given to the First Congregational Church of San Francisco in 1926, Burbank said:

“I love humanity, which has been a constant delight to me during all my seventy-seven years of life; and I love flowers, trees, animals, and all the works of Nature as they pass before us in time and space. What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colors, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavor never before seen on this globe; and grains of enormously increased productiveness, j whose fat kernels are filled with more and better nourishment, a veritable storehouse of perfect food.”

Burbank died of a heart attack on April 11, 1926, aged 77, and is buried near the greenhouse at the j Luther Burbank Home and Gardens.

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The Sad Story of Europe’s Economic Ne’er-Do-Well

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, in the first line of his novel “Anna Karenina.” The same could be said of unhappy countries.

I’ve just returned from spending Easter in Hungary, which regularly vies for the title of the most pessimistic country in the world. Although the mention of Hungary rarely makes it into the Western press, the country has recently crept back into the headlines as one of the countries alongside Iceland, the Ukraine and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia on the verge of economic collapse. Like many, small developing countries, Hungary is an economic minnow. Its GDP of around $140 billion gives it as much economic heft as an average U.S. Midwestern city — say Minneapolis. But if Chile has been posited as a model for how a small developing country should conduct its economic affairs, consider the case of Hungary as a warning of the consequences of a dangerous cocktail of cronyism, a culture of petty corruption, leavened by a good dose of a uniquely local brand of negative thinking.

Once at the vanguard of economic reforms of the former Communist bloc, Hungary has become Europe’s biggest economic basket case. Today, Budapest’s graffiti-infested streets stand in sharp contrast to the Disneyland quality of renovated Prague to the north. Ambitiously designed “corporate campuses” that sought to. replicate the high tech success of Hungarian-Americans Andrew Grove (Intel) and Charles Simonyi (Microsoft) now stand largely empty on the banks of the Danube. American law firms that once worked on setting up joint ventures in what was Eastern Europe’s most attractive destination of foreign investment 10 years ago, now pay their bills working on the bankruptcies of AIG and GM. Real estate projects along Budapest’s Andrassy Boulevard — whose asking prices rivaled that of prime West London property only a year ago -- now stand unfinished, and seemingly abandoned.

Ironically, Hungary’s travails are not about size or about the current economic crisis. Hungary was in deep trouble even before October, when it was bailed out to the tune of $25 billion by the European Union. Instead, Hungary’s problems can be traced back to the inevitable consequences of irresponsible economic policies, cronyism, and a widespread culture of petty corruption. From his perch at the European Union headquarters in Brussels, a British diplomat told me last week that Hungarian politicians are widely viewed as ranking “number 27 out of 27 among the EU members.” Indeed, Hungary has become somewhat of an economic pariah even in its own run-down neighborhood. When outgoing Prime Minister Gyurcsany dramatically warned of “a new economic Iron Curtain” descending upon Eastern Europe if his demands for an economic bailout package amounting to 180 billion euros weren’t met, the Czech Republic and Poland were quick to distance themselves from their profligate neighbor. The Germans — the rich uncle in the EU who would get to pick up the tab -- dripped with vitriol in condemning Hungary’s chutzpah.

I think culture, values and psychology have much to do with a country’s success. It’s the Americans’ hard work and optimism that accounted for the rise of the United States. And it’s a culture of excessive debt that accounts for its current travails.

Twenty years ago, Budapest was the shining star of the Communist Bloc and Prague was a sleepy backwater, even as its Karl Marx University, where I was a Fulbright scholar, still had a “Department of Central Planning” and Marxian “dialectical materialism” was a twoyear required course for all economics undergraduates. From that intellectual tradition arose one of the most open and progressive regimes for foreign investment in all of Eastern Europe.

But if such concentrations of influence are inevitable in small countries, I wonder if other pernicious values aren’t. Hungary suffers from a particular breed of anti-cosmopolitanism. Hungarian senior managers at multi-nationals shudder at the thought of being sent abroad for regional positions. The former and current Hungarian prime minister cut their political teeth as leaders of the Communist Youth League. In contrast, the president of Estonia is a Columbia and Penn graduate and sends his son to Stanford. And while even some Russian oligarchs invested in getting a Harvard MBA, Hungary’s current political leaders wouldn’t know Harvard Business School from a hole in the ground.

And then there is the culture of petty corruption that has penetrated the interstices of everyday life. A few years ago, I once sat at a dinner with leading figures in the Hungarian media world as each regaled our fellow guests with stories of how they cheated their way into university, and then how they systematically stole copies of exams to pass their courses. To them, their scam was a sign of their intelligence. Just this weekend, I witnessed an upper middle class professional family scheming how the mother could stop working by the age of 55, yet still get a full state pension. Cheating the government in Hungary is a way of life. Whether you call this “street smarts” versus “book smarts” doesn’t really matter. The cancerous effect of this culture speaks for itself.

There are some signs that a global perspective is reaching into even Hungary. The long arm of U.S. law is reaching into Hungary, with some real consequences. The CEO of Magyar Telecom (MTA), the only Hungarian company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, was ousted a few years ago after running afoul of some U.S. regulations. The entire senior management of Hungary’s leading cable company was recently replaced for irregularities that came up during an investigation.

But I suspect even an economic miracle and graffiti-free buildings wouldn’t make Hungarians any happier. Just as American optimism is the motor of American life, Hungarian pessimism is the engine behind the country’s petty corruption and constant political bickering. As a Hungarian psychologist pointed out to me, Hungarians rarely take responsibility for their actions. They will always lay the blame at the feet of the Mongol hordes, the Battle of Mohács (1526), the Thrkish occupation, Habsburg rule, Treaty of Trianon (1918), two lost wars, and the crushed revolution of 1956. In other countries, fairy tales may end with the phrase: “And they lived happily ever after.” In Hungary, fairy tales end with: “And they lived happily ever after... until they died.”

SourceriVicholasÁ'ardy’s THE GLOBAL GURU http://www.theglobalguru.com/

Május 1. 2009 ^0